On 2 Aug 1999, Sortech Limited wrote:
> I have been looking around for documentation on programming the Mathematica
> interface. It looks like Stephen Wolfram got bored writing that part of the
> book and decided to concentrate on less commercial aspects!
In all fairness, _The Mathematica Book_ does state that the examples are
not chosen for their commerical applicability. Quoting from section at
the beginning of the book titled "The Scope of the Book":
| You should understand, however, that the examples in this book are
| chosen primarily for their simplicity, rather than to correspond to
| realistic calculations in particular application areas.
|
| There are many other publications that discuss Mathematica from the
| viewpoint of particular classes of applications. In some cases, you may
| find it better to read one of these publications first, and read this
| book only when you need a more general perspective on Mathematica.
|
| Mathematica is a system built on a fairly small set of very powerful
| principles. This book describes those principles, but by no means spells
| out all of their implications. In particular, while the book describes
| the elements that go into Mathematica programs, it does not give
| detailed examples of complete programs. For those, you should look at
| other publications.
> The Loan.nb pointed out by Paul Hinton is a pointer to what can be
> achieved but I cant see how to program it from what is in The Book.
>
> Is there a good text out there which guides the user to producing Notebooks
> that look like Forms so that they can be used to generate Reports in
> Notebooks?
For programming the front end and creating dialog boxes, you may want to
refer to John Novak's talk materials from the 1998 Worldwide Mathematica
Conference.
http://library.wolfram.com/conferences/conference98/abstracts/programming_the_front_end.html
For creating formatted output, see John McLoone's notebooks from the same
conference.
http://library.wolfram.com/conferences/conference98/abstracts/report_generation.html
--
P.J. Hinton
Mathematica Programming Group paulh at wolfram.com
Wolfram Research, Inc.
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed herein are those of the author alone.